Throughout the 27th Annual Whitaker St. Louis International Film Festival (SLIFF), the writers at the Lens will be spotlighting their favorite narrative and documentary films on this year's festival schedule. Each day, our critics will discuss can't-miss festival highlights, foreign gems that have already made an international splash, and smaller cinematic teasures that might have overwise been overlooked – just in time for you to snap up tickets.

The Great Buddha+ is so indebted to many cinematic influences – the deadpan comedy of Jim Jarmusch and Aki Kaurismaki, Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) and its varied emulations, the early meta-movies of Jean-Luc Godard, to name a few – the fact that it coheres together so brilliantly is something of a miracle. Director Hsin-yao Huang adapted his own prize-winning short, The Great Buddha, adding the “+” to his feature version to cheekily acknowledge the role technology plays in his condemnation of class structures in his native Taiwan.

The narrative proper centers on Pickle (Cres Chuang) and Belly Button (Bamboo Chu-Sheng Chen), two perverted members of the proletariat who become embroiled in a murder plot after entertaining themselves with dashcam footage from Pickle’s supremely rich “artist” boss Kevin Huang (Leon Dai). Buddha+ could have easily been approached as a stylish genre exercise, but the filmmaker enriches it with endless cinematic invention. The first is his voiceover announcement that he, Hsin-yao Huang the director, will serve as a guide to the film. The narrative and thematic digressions he voices throughout the film are just a few of the rich Brechtian distancing techniques he freely deploys.

Another innovative choice is the blown-out color of the dashcam footage that interrupts the film’s sumptuous black-and-white digital cinematography – the best this side of Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014) – that captures the natural beauty of rural Taiwan alongside the rotted-out hovels for its forgotten inhabitants. Like Amirpour’s subversive genre-bender, The Great Buddha+ also contains threads of political commentary, here about the widening chasm between rich and poor. Pickle and Bell often talk about their financial aspirations, hilariously undercooked to the point that director Huang points out their laughable futility. "Birth is eight-tenths of destiny," Pickle declares at one point.

The film gets its title from a towering Buddha statue Kevin is constructing in his residence-cum-art-factory compound. During the film’s funniest scene – Buddha+ indeed expertly balances potent satire with vulgar comedy – Kevin’s clients pray to the statue while simultaneously criticizing its wonky features. Its makers and those who brokered the deal then awkwardly attempt to sell the work’s shortcomings, and the moment reveals itself as the filmmaker’s condemnation of the intersection of art, religion, and commerce.

What they don’t know is that their ultimate religious icon has become a vessel for a nefarious activity, and soon the director announces that the film is at its midpoint. The change is palpable as gears shift from a nose-thumbing missive that is nevertheless creatively engaging to a somber tale about the abuses of power that oppress the underprivileged. Kevin’s easy evasion of police interrogation thanks to his public persona, along with Belly Button’s violent roadside arrest – the latter shown through dashcam footage and later in an audience-privileging bird’s-eye shot – are reminders that these imbalances are universal problems. In its graceful and mysterious final act, though, The Great Buddha+ suggests that higher forces may be working to realign the injustices. It’s a hopeful move for a film that has already portrayed humanity at both its best and worst.

The Great Buddha+ screens Saturday, Nov. 3 at 7:00 p.m. and Wednesday, Nov. 7 at 6:35 p.m., both days at the Landmark Plaza Frontenac Cinema. Buy tickets now.

Throughout the 27th Annual Whitaker St. Louis International Film Festival (SLIFF), the writers at the Lens will be spotlighting their favorite narrative and documentary films on this year's festival schedule. Each day, our critics will discuss can't-miss festival highlights, foreign gems that have already made an international splash, and smaller cinematic teasures that might have overwise been overlooked – just in time for you to snap up tickets.

Roughly halfway through its running time, the sublimely strange Brazilian feature Good Manners shifts with shocking savagery from one species of story into a wildly different one. As such, it’s challenging to discuss the film – a lurid and ambitious genre mashup from the writer-director team of Marco Dutra and Juliana Rojas (Hard Labor [2011]) – without straying into serious spoiler territory. The feature begins in a measured, realistic mode laced with prickly racial, gender, and sexual subtext. São Paulo native Clara (Isabél Zuaa, wonderfully self-possessed) is an Afro-Brazilian nurse who interviews for a nanny position with Ana (Marjorie Estiano), a wealthy white expectant mother in a chic, high-rise apartment. Despite her thin résumé, Clara lands the job when she leaps to respond soothingly and intuitively to Ana’s stabbing pregnancy pangs.

Ana is a bit of a spoiled little rich girl, but she’s estranged from her family and seemingly friendless, exiled from her plantation upbringing to raise her imminent child alone in the big city. Clara’s new position is characterized by what management types term “scope creep”: She’s not just the nanny-to-be, but also Ana’s maid, cook, shopper, and confidant-by-default. Despite the systemic racial and class inequalities built into their relationship, the two women grow on one another, discovering a steadfast friendship that eventually takes on romantic and erotic dimensions. The passion is laced with dark unease, however. Clara discovers that Ana sleepwalks on the four nights of the full moon, rummaging through the fridge for raw meat and eventually shuffling out into the streets to catch and devour (!) stray cats. There’s also the matter of the baby’s biological father, a hirsute mystery man who vanished into the night shortly after hooking up with Ana – also during the full moon.

Dutra and Rojas present this bizarre scenario with an air of crisp, ghoulish absurdity that’s reminiscent of Yorgos Lanthimos (The Lobster [2015]; The Killing of a Sacred Deer [2017]), albeit warmer and queerer. Until the film’s midpoint heel-turn, Good Manners feels deliciously unpredictable in a way that only daring genre-benders such as this ever really manage. (Oh, yes: In addition to a flashback rendered in vivid hand-drawn pictures, this grisly lesbian werewolf movie also happens to feature musical numbers.) After one night of horrific heartbreak, however, the film leaps forward in time and shifts gears, assuming a much more familiar shape, especially to veteran creature-feature fans: a ticking-clock tragedy about a latent lycanthropic curse.

While it undeniably loses some of its idiosyncratic ambiance in its second half, Good Manners still manages to put an agreeably distinctive spin on its beastly tropes. Besides grounding their story in the rich textures and jarring contrasts of Brazilian city life, the directors lean into the intrinsic poignancy of a parent-child relationship in extremis, evoking films both creepy and angst-ridden, including Rosemary’s Baby (1968), It’s Alive (1974), We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011), and Room (2015).

Granted, Dutra and Rojas take their sweet time checking off the same story beats that landmarks like The Wolfman (1941) and An American Werewolf in London (1981) dashed through with predatory urgency. The ponderous pace isn’t all bad, however: It gives Good Manners the chance to simmer in its dense atmosphere of sorrow and doom, offering a welcome counterpoint to the campiness of dodgy CGI metamorphosis and a literal torch-and-pitchfork mob. The film concludes with a markedly ambiguous moment that seems to preclude a traditional happy ending, which is of a piece with its open-ended thematic character. Depending on the angle, Good Manners can be regarded as the story of a mother protecting her queer child from a resurgent fascist political climate … or that of a gay woman anxiously navigating her straight son’s nascent, snarling pubescence. Or it might just be an admonishment to never feed kids red meat.

Throughout the 27th Annual Whitaker St. Louis International Film Festival (SLIFF), the writers at the Lens will be spotlighting their favorite narrative and documentary films on this year's festival schedule. Each day, our critics will discuss can't-miss festival highlights, foreign gems that have already made an international splash, and smaller cinematic teasures that might have overwise been overlooked – just in time for you to snap up tickets.

Marguerite Duras is most familiar to cinephiles as the screenwriter of Alain Resnais’ breakout narrative feature Hiroshima mon amour (1959), an earth-shattering announcement of new cinematic possibilities that is often lumped in with the beginnings of the French New Wave. However, Hiroshima – with its impressionistic portrait of personal and collective World War II trauma – couldn’t be further removed from the rough-edged, freewheeling movie-movies of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960) and Francois Trauffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959), two other key proclamations of French filmic liberation.

In viewing Memoir of War, Emmanuel Finkiel’s adaptation of Duras’ autobiographical novel Le Douleur (translation: pain), it becomes clear that the nouveau roman-contingent author is owed as much credit for the supreme emotional depth of Hiroshima as is its director. In Finkiel’s film, Duras herself (Mélanie Thierry) is the protagonist and narrator, with the author’s prose serving as her internal dialogue as she navigates both Nazi-occupied and post-liberation France. Duras obsessively searches for her detained Resistance-member husband (Emmanuel Bourdieu, mostly viewed in ghostly glimpses) and attempts to trace his movements through prisoner-of-war and concentration camps, ultimately fighting a battle to retain her own personal agency and mental strength.

Given that it portrays the early life of a French national treasure, one might expect Memoir to be a hagiographic biopic, but both the source novel and the script are too intelligent for such banality. There’s also Thierry, an actor given the monumental challenge of portraying a well-known figure. She does so not with gilded reverence for Duras, but with the quiet restraint and power necessary for this specific story – only allowing for emotional fireworks in one particularly appropriate and heartbreaking moment near the end of the film.

The bifurcated structure mirrors Duras’ shattered internal self, but it also presents a unique rhetorical shift for a film. The first half is a suspense narrative as the writer psychologically (and nearly sexually) manipulates an SS officer (Benoît Magimel) into divulging information about her imprisoned husband, while also obscuring her own involvement with the Resistance. When that con proves futile just as France’s liberation begins, the film shifts wholly into a patient grief narrative, as Duras is left to wait for her husband's return. Her learned helplessness mutates into supreme guilt. She can’t settle what she feels is a selfish need for one man’s survival with the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis, a dilemma compounded by both the celebration of returning prisoners and the erasure of nameless victims by the Gaullists.

While this film is much more of a literal depiction of survivor’s guilt than Resnais’ Hiroshima, Finkiel’s feature still occasionally dips into surreality, mirroring its protagnosist’s dissociation, anguish, and guilt. The director manifests ghosts haunting Duras just outside of the frame – or just out of focus within it – and the heroine often finds herself staring at her future or past self in an attempt to reconcile her actions with her feelings. Finkiel also keeps his camera remarkably close to his protagonist, disorienting his audience with blocking and manifesting Duras’ dislocation through shallow focus and choice camera setups; often, she is partly obscured in windows and door frames. The film’s final shot is a superb encapsulation of this working mode when the camera shifts and loses focus to resemble a pointistic painting, visualizing the murkiness of death in its many forms: physical, emotional, and spiritual.

Memoir of War screens Friday, Nov. 2 at 12:00 p.m. and Sunday, Nov 4 at 12:00 p.m., both days at the Landmark Plaza Frontenac Cinema. Buy tickets now.

Dance Dance Revolution

First things first: Director Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria is not really a remake of Dario Argento’s inimitable 1977 giallo-turned-fantasia of the same name, at least not in any remotely meaningful sense of the word. Both films are (loosely) horror features, and both are centered on a Berlin-based dance school that serves as a front for a witches' coven. Other than those reductive facts and some shared character names and traits, Suspiria 2018 has almost nothing in common with Suspiria 1977. To say that the former is a remake of the latter is akin to asserting that Blood for Dracula (1974) is a remake of Nosferatu (1922): technically correct in some tortured sense, but not very relevant or edifying.

Nonetheless, owing to the shared title – and a “based on characters by” credit to Argento and his collaborator and then-partner Daria Nicolodi – it’s perhaps inevitable that Guadagnino’s film will be discussed in the context of its predecessor’s long, blood-red shadow. Indeed, it’s clear that Guadagnino has, in numerous respects, quite deliberately fashioned his Suspiria as a counterpoint to Argento’s feature. The 1977 film operates according to the logic of a nightmarish fairy tale, reveling in the way that color, sound, and music can be employed as vectors for pure, almost abstracted terror. The Suspiria of 2018, meanwhile, is chilly and cerebral, a thesis on all the unsettled atrocities of the past and present, couched in the vocabulary of feminist theory and body horror. It’s gray and severe where Argento’s film is garish and florid; political rather than mythic; forlorn rather than fantastical. If the first Suspiria is Matisse’s Dance, then the second is Francis Bacon’s Pope Innocent X.

Almost by definition, Guadagnino’s version could never be as aesthetically and primordially galvanic as its namesake. (How could it? What filmmaker would even want to try?) For that, Argento enthusiasts will perhaps inevitably give this reimagining all kinds of flak, some of it deserved, most of it not. Unquestionably, Suspiria 2018 is an intellectually immodest thing, as swollen with ideas as a 2,000-page dissertation on Marxist themes in the oeuvre of director Rainer Werner Fassbinder (whose works this film at times evokes). Yet Guadagnino’s feature is ultimately content to be thought-provoking rather than groundbreaking – if occasionally horrific in bizarre, innovative ways.

Where a different sort of art-horror filmmaker might have resisted any gesture that could be construed as pretension, Guadagnino – here taking his initial, without-a-net plunge into the genre, after the Apollonian warmth of last year’s Call Me by Your Name – seems to have embraced pretense, preemptively and lustily. That’s certainly a choice, as they say, and the director deserves credit for his boldness. This Suspiria, after all, is a ground-up reworking of a horror feature that has been canonized as a singular, untouchable masterpiece. Guadagnino could have been forgiven for playing it safe and treating his film merely as an opportunity to pay reverent homage to Argento’s original.

Instead, the director has taken some wild risks. Most prominently, he has explicitly set this tale of blackest magic against the backdrop of the real-world(-ish) events of late 1977 (the “German Autumn”). The Red Army Faction is abducting executives, the Stasi has eyes everywhere, and the Lufthansa 181 hijacking plays out on overheard radio broadcasts. This sort of pointed political context doesn’t necessarily pay the thematic dividends that Guadagnino seems to have intended, instead often coming off as a kind of jarring Cold War cosplay. Smoking cigarettes and bustling about their shared kitchen, the film’s witches ironically seem more realistic than the crowds of generic left-wing protesters agitating for the release of RAF founders Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof – the latter already (oops) dead in the ground over a year by October 1977. Overall, however, Guadagnino is broadly successful in his efforts to frame this Suspiria – a mad tale of esoteric feminine power and ritual dance-as-magic – as one vivid fragment in an eternal human drama of coups, purges, and glorious revolutions.

Set in a “divided Berlin” the same year that Argento’s original was released, this version is similarly centered on an American ingenue named Susie Bannion (Dakota Johnson), although here she is fleshed out as a Good Christian Girl hailing from a Mennonite enclave in Ohio. Having once seen Berlin's vehemently modern Markos Dance Academy perform during a trip to New York, Susie became obsessed with joining the school at an early age. Now a young adult, she has made her way to Germany, even as her poor, ailing mother lies bedridden back at her family's Ohio farm, wheezing painfully on the brink of death. Susie guilelessly presents herself to the Markos Academy instructors, including headmistress and creative director Madame Blanc (Tilda Swinton), an artiste’s artiste who glides about in black caftans making proclamations such as “We must break the nose of every beautiful thing.” Despite her complete absence of résumé, references, or formal training, Susie’s audition dazzles the academy’s teachers, who assure her that no tuition is needed, the school being long ago organized as a financially autonomous artist's collective.

That detail – as well as the absence of the male students who appeared on the margins of Argento’s film – hints at this Suspiria’s absorption with female power wielded independently of any relationship to patriarchy. Early in the film, Guadagnino captures the academy staff during an informal election, his camera circling hypnotically as the women gather and verbally vote for either Blanc or the absent incumbent, academy founder Helena Markos. (The latter emerges as the victor, a point that will be relevant later.) Outside the walls of the academy there might be Popular Front hijackings and blood-dimmed chaos, but within there is feminine accord – at least at first glance.

Pointedly, the only male character of any import in the film is a doddering, half-deaf Jewish psychiatrist, Josef Klemperer (portrayed by “Lutz Ebersdorf,” actually Swinton under old-age prosthetics). Wracked by survivor’s guilt over the wartime death of his wife (played in flashbacks by the original Susie Bannion, Jessica Harper), the elderly doctor is perpetually shuffling through dismal government checkpoints, first West to his office apartment, then East to his one-room dacha, then back again. He’s a fitting proxy for the men that the Markos matrons find so contemptibly inessential, a figure ultimately more pitiable than threatening.

It’s through Klemperer, however, that the viewer first learns of the Markos school’s dark secrets, just before Susie arrives in Germany. One of the doctor’s patients, Patricia (Chloë Grace Moretz), turns up on his doorstep in an agitated state, babbling paranoid fantasies. A student at the Markos Academy, she’s come to believe that her instructors are witches with foul designs on her body and soul. “They’ll hollow me out and eat my cunt on a plate,” she declares with matter-of-fact fatalism. Convinced that every eye peering out from a photo or book cover is a scrying organ for the coven, she abruptly flees Klemperer’s office and thereafter vanishes. She leaves behind a scrawled journal, however, which the doctor peruses with mounting concern in the coming days. He may not believe in witchcraft, but he does believe in criminal conspiracy, in addition to knowing thing or two about the darkling allure of symbols and titles.

Conveniently enough for the newly arrived Susie, Patricia’s disappearance – which the academy staff suggests is related to her flirtations with radical Communism – happens to open up a bed in the school’s dormitories. There, Susie befriends Sara (Mia Goth), a fellow student with a savvy-sweet personality, and soon enough the pair are embarking on a Nancy Drew-ish snooping expedition and cuddling up together in bed as a bulwark against disturbing nightmares (such dreams being "a Markos Academy specialty"). Seemingly overnight, Susie assumes the mantle of school phenom, much to the consternation of some of the established students. When the lead dancer (Elena Fokina) in the academy’s new performance departs in a tearful huff, Susie volunteers to rehearse the protagonist role without any prior experience. This she does in a bravura scene that culminates in grotesque horror, as Susie’s thrusting hands and stomping feet become – unbeknownst to her – literal weapons in a rite of sympathetic death magic. It seems that Blanc and Co. have big plans for their new star, as evidenced by murmurs concerning failed rituals, imperfect vessels, and Markos’ clandestine arrival at the school.

For this macabre tale, Guadagnino affects an eccentric visual style that evokes classic 1970s horror features: giallos from Mario Bava and Argento himself, of course, but also British genre landmarks like The Wicker Man (1973), The Shout (1978), and especially Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973). As they did in Call Me by Your Name, Guadagnino and Thai cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom employ 35mm film and a relatively conservative 1.85:1 widescreen ratio to give the film a faintly dated look. However, it’s the more ornate visual gestures such as snap zooms, freeze frames, and jittery slow motion that place Suspiria decisively within its (illusory) 1977 context. While aesthetically distinct from the crumbling necropolis that Roeg fashioned from nocturnal Venice in Don’t Look Now, the cold, slate-gray edifices of Suspiria’s brutalist Berlin architecture feel similarly forlorn. There are radical protests in the streets, but this Germany seems decimated, depopulated, and besieged, full of empty spaces peopled mostly by the ghosts of the Third Reich’s victims. The words of Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert resonate: tuesday: the mayor is killed by unknown assailants / wednesday: talks of armistice the enemy interned our envoys / we don’t know where they are being kept i.e. tortured.

Caught like a pinned beetle between the almighty Deutsche Mark and Communist terror – and still agonized by the convulsions of its psychic denazification – Suspiria’s Berlin is an unexpectedly redolent backdrop for a repulsive, gore-spattered tale of politicking witches. For political upheaval is ultimately what Susie’s arrival represents in the conception of Guadagnino and screenwriter David Kajganich – who also penned the director’s A Bigger Splash (2016) and AMC’s icebound horror series The Terror (2018). While the Markos coven is presented as a group that thrums with very real yonic energy, its machinations are not all that different from those of the male-dominated nation-states and guerilla cells it reviles. Suspiria is, at bottom, the story of a revolution, and whether political or magical, all transformations require a blood sacrifice. The coven simply pursues such ends within a fiercely feminine occult idiom that explicitly muddles creation and destruction. (Kali might well be their patron goddess.) It’s hardly incidental that the witches’ favored weapon is a gruesome bronze hook; where a male villain might wield a more overtly phallic stabbing blade, the Markos women prefer a parabola-like instrument that suggests a uterine or vaginal form. These witches also cackle: shrilly, mirthlessly, and disdainfully, their peals slicing assaultively into the sound mix in a way that recalls the film's pre-sync giallo antecedents.

Susie is less the protagonist of this anarchic story than its catalyzing agent. Harper’s 1977 iteration of the character was a wide-eyed babe in the woods, shrinking like a silent-film damsel from every fresh horror. Johnson’s Susie is dreamier and more inscrutable, her wavy auburn tresses suggesting not innocence but threat. Even Blanc seems a bit perturbed by her new protégé’s sorcerous power, eyeing her nervously as Susie asserts control over her choreography and speaks in disconcerting non sequiturs: “Why is everyone so ready to think the worst is over?”

Her suspicions prodded by a meeting with Klemperer, it is Sara who fills the role of the film’s sleuthing heroine for a time, at least until she stumbles onto the coven’s secrets and draws the witches’ ire. With Patricia’s forgotten journal in hand – its margins scribbled with arcane hierarchies, RAF logos, and references to three immortal “mothers” – Klemperer is thereafter the only character left to carry on the search for the truth. Ultimately, however, the aged psychiatrist is more of an impotent bystander than a seeker: sadistically manipulated, humiliated, and enslaved as a mute witness to the coven’s sabbath. Flouting genre conventions that demand a (often male) “detective” character who successfully ferrets out the facts, Guadagnino’s film is more elegy than thriller, a long, shuddering exhale of sorrow for all that has been (and will be) lost in the myriad atrocities of human history.

It’s weighty stuff for a lurid tale about murderous witches, and at times the director’s intellectual ambitions outrun his ability to keep the whole confounding thing held together. The constant references to the events of the German Autumn often feel unaccountably phony, and while the aim might be to ground the fantastical elements, all the Wikipedia name-dropping has the perverse effect of dislocating the film’s events from reality. Relatedly, it’s not clear what purpose is served by slotting Swinton into the Klemperer role. This bit of stunt casting is more distracting than illuminating, as is often the case with incidents of coy, latex-assisted age- and gender-bending. Perhaps the filmmaker’s intention was along the lines of the Wachowskis in Cloud Atlas (2012) – a vivid, faintly transgressive means to illustrate the characters’ shared humanity – but the result is similarly off-putting. (Swinton is, nonetheless, quite good in the role, especially as the film wears on and the suffocating weight of Klemperer’s guilt and helplessness is more keenly felt.)

Nothing is quite so emblematic of the film’s over-extension, however, as Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke’s calculatingly schizophrenic score. In the abstract, it’s a fine, even entrancing composition. However, the score's musical style swings so wildly from scene to scene that that it quashes any sense of unifying theme. The film’s aural landscape is perpetually shifting, abruptly and discordantly: now rumbling ambient noise; now a slinky melody layered with sitar-like droning; now a chilly synth requiem; now Yorke’s characteristic ethereal vocals and piano tinkling. Most perplexingly, the composer rolls out a lush, almost lounge-like love song for the film’s blood-drenched climax, a choice that ranks alongside the use of Joe Cocker’s cover of “You Are So Beautiful” in Carlito’s Way (1993) for sheer, left-field dissonance.

Much more resoundingly successful is Guadagnino’s employment of dance, an element that was almost incidental in Argento’s original, but here serves as the film’s writhing, stamping heart. What color was to the 1977 Suspiria, motion is to the 2018 Suspiria. The Markos Academy does not teach classical ballet, or even the edgy modern ballet of Black Swan (2010), but a ferocious and dramatic mode of contemporary dance, in the style of legendary German choreographer Pina Bausch. Editor Walter Fasano cuts the dance sequences – wonderfully choreographed by the artistically dauntless Damien Jalet – in violent and emphatic fashion, underlining the thematic essence of Guadagnino’s film: The movement of human bodies according to ritual formulae is nothing less than a kind of spellwork, and like all magic it may be used for purposes either beneficial or malign. (Mostly the latter in this case.)

Of course, the Markos coven never really seems to do much with its supernatural talents, other than to consolidate power for its own sake, and in this respect their dark sisterhood ironically mirrors the squabbling male polities outside the academy. If there’s a feminine grace to be found in their conjurations, it’s paradoxically embodied in Mother Suspirium, a demon witch-goddess who lurks at the story’s periphery. It’s she who delivers the film’s rare gestures of mercy, and it’s she who appears in a stunning transfiguration at the climax. Her ribcage split open to reveal her throbbing viscera, she evokes not only the exaggerated vulva of a sheela na gig on a medieval church, but no less a figure than the Virgin Mary with her pierced and flaming Immaculate Heart.

Youth in Revolt

There’s lately been a resurgence of films centered on teens, but these features don’t quite resemble either John Hughes’ watershed films of the 1980s or the light comedies and slashers of the late 1990s that used the late director’s work as a templates. The individual films of this latest crop could hardly be seen as treading common ground. Instead they tend to spring from their makers’ unique creative visions and experiences, while generally eschewing the genre’s tried-and-true narrative setups. Although films exploring pubescent anxieties have hardly been a rarity at any time in the past century, these new films are finding a fresh way to use coming-of-age stories to explore the shared anxieties of contemporary America and its subcultures.

The year 2018 has yielded an interesting and varied array of teen films that could be included in this mini-movement. Coming-out story Love, Simon was a saccharine-sweet studio film that actually did use a Hughes schematic, albeit with queer characters at the fore – while also managing some modest box-office success. While that fim tended towards generalizing queer life, comedian Bo Burnham’s debut feature Eighth Grade was so exacting in creating a young woman’s experience in contemporary times, he made one of the most precise (and cringe-worthy) portraits of living in the social-media era. Likewise, the sublimely off-kilter indie Madeline’s Madeline centers on another young “woman under the influence,” here a theater-troupe member whose fractured psyche is manifested not only in the show in which she’s performing but also in the film itself. On the other end of the cinematic spectrum, two recent documentaries about skateboarding kids, Skate Kitchen and Minding the Gap, mine the world of the sport to explore gender politics in contemporary times.

In current release, the narrative feature Mid90s, the directorial debut of actor Jonah Hill, shares the skatepark setting of the aforementioned docs. While monumentally breezier, it also contains some common threads concerning race and toxic masculinity that tie if to yet another – albeit much more overtly political – film currently in theaters, the YA adaptation The Hate U Give.

The Hate U Give

The Hate U Give borrows its title from THUGLIFE, an acronym coined by the late West Coast hip-hop legend Tupac Shakur. Its original meaning – The Hate U Give Little Infants Fucks Everything – is as blunt and jejune as the film itself. The feature centers on Starr Carter (Amandla Stenberg), a young black woman who straddles life between her predominantly black and fatally dangerous neighborhood, the fictional Garden Heights, and the largely white private school she attends in the suburbs. This double life is one of weekdays with her upper-middle-class schoolmates and weekends with her less privileged neighbors and distant family members. One fateful night in Garden Heights finds Starr as the sole witness to the murder of her lifelong friend, Khalil (Algee Smith), at the hands of a white policeman.

Her struggle with how to deal with her black-culture-appropriating white friends – including her white boyfriend, Chris (K.J. Apa) – are just the first moves the film makes to establish a microcosm of life for people of color in the United States. The feature is thuddingly obvious about ideas more sneakily woven into the texture of another, and much better, recent film with racial politics on its mind, Support the Girls, However, director George Tillman Jr.’s The Hate U Give morphs into astoundingly resonant melodrama, a form that couldn’t be further from Andrew Bujalski’s low-key comedy-of-manners. (The two films also share the sublime Regina Hall as their mother figures.) The microaggressions start to take on (appropriately) monumental weight for both the viewer and Starr after the film’s inciting incident, creating a holistic and vital portrait of the systemic oppression against black Americans.

By depicting an all-too-real narrative with an achingly earnest mode of expression, Tillman straddles a line between audience involvement and abandonment. The director nearly falls off this tightrope in the film’s climax, which literalizes Shakur’s acronym. However, when the surrounding film also contains startlingly moving scenes of Starr’s increasing involvement in a Black Lives Matter-like movement, the misstep is easily forgiven. The seemingly conflicting tones are largely balanced by an excellent cast, including Hall as Starr’s conflicted mother, Russell Hornsby as Starr’s ex-con-turned-entrepreneur father, Common as a black cop torn between protecting his niece and what he sees as his duties, and Anthony Mackie as Garden Heights’ violent drug kingpin. They satellite the superb Stenberg, who capably handles the tasks given to her in performing one young woman’s coming of age, a transformation rooted in her realization of the gross injustices facing her and her community.

Rating: B-

Mid90s

Placed dead-center in Mid90s’ squarish Academy-ratio frame, Stevie (Sunny Suljic) glides down the middle of a sunny, busy interstate on his skateboard, lagging slightly behind his new, more experienced and older skateboarding friends. Soundtracked to the anachronistic the Mamas & the Papas’ hit cover of “Dedicated to the One I Love,” the shot is a choreographed expression of newfound passion and belonging. Director Hill mirrors this shot again after one member of that group, the particularly talented Ray (Na-kel Smith), provides the 13-year-old Stevie with a shot of much-needed reality regarding the world he’s just entered. Sans the autumnal harmonies of the ’60s pop group and now at sparsely populated dusk, the setup reflects the melancholy underlying teenage years when the world begins to present itself more clearly.

The film is sparingly decorated with small-scale miracles like these – a foreshadowing crane shot showing the journey Stevie will take when he fails a jump across roofs is another – but their purposeful infrequency demonstrates that Mid90s is not some grand announcement of a new directoral talent in actor-turned-director Hill. Instead, this low-key and sun-drenched portrait of identity formation coasts on the smallest of gestures and movements. Stevie lives with his single mother, Dabney (Katherine Waterston), a woman split between providing for and caring for of Stevie and his older brother, Ian (Lucas Hedges). The two boys’ fraught relationship is further widened by their macho posturing, which frequently erupts into violence. That masculine toxicity ripples outward into the film in the form of Stevie’s self-harm – a means of feeling something, anything – and the competition and jealousy that nearly destroy his new group of friends before the film’s climax coheres it back together.

These are ideas more explicitly explored in Bing Liu’s years-long self-portrait of himself and his skater friends, Minding the Gap – there’s even a character parallel to Gap’s Lui who is documenting Stevie and the gang in Mid90s. At a scant 85 minutes, Hill’s debut as a director is as minor as its diminutive protagonist, but its most graceful moments prove there’s still reasons to make yet another teen movie. This one is sure to be compared to Greta Gerwig’s Ladybird (2017) due to its similar pedigree, but that director's supreme wit and precisely drawn characters easily ushered her feature debut into the pantheon of great movies about youth. Mid90s, however, is such a light affair that it merely piques interest in seeing what the capable director Hill will do next.

Recent Video-on-Demand Offerings in Horror and Horror-Related Cinema

The cream of contemporary feature-length cinema isn’t always found in theaters. These days, smaller and more niche films often implement a same-day launch, simultaneously premiering in a select-city theatrical run and on video-on-demand (VOD) services. Moreover, streaming services are now offering original films of their own. Given the dire and disposable state of the horror genre at the multiplex, these release strategies are particularly suited to reaching a wider, more appreciative audience for cinematic chills. For horror fans in a mid- to small-sized movie market such as St. Louis, online streaming and digital rental/purchase are increasingly vital means of accessing noteworthy features. What follows is a brief assessment of the major new horror (and horror-adjacent) films that have premiered on VOD within the past month.

Satan’s Slaves (Pengabdi Setan)

Writer-director Joko Anwar’s self-assured remake of an obscure 1980 Indonesian cult classic is couched in an evocative rural Javanese milieu that lends the feature a lived-in richness. It’s fortunate that Anwar sweats the details of his Islamic-flavored ghost story, given that the narrative beats and jump-scares in Satan’s Slaves feel regrettably derivative. Nicking liberally from Rosemary’s Baby (1968), The Omen (1976), The Conjuring (2013), and several decades’ worth of J-horror, the new film concerns the hard-luck family of an ailing and forgotten pop chanteuse. Following their mother’s death early in the feature, the four siblings discover that they are being haunted – not just by mom’s restless spirit, but also by the aftershocks of the twisted occult dealings she had in life. All told, it’s a well-worn yet gratifyingly creepy tale, where the creased, humid setting consistently distracts from the nagging familiarity of the ghostly head games and “shocking” plot twists. Rating: B-[Now available to stream exclusively on Shudder.]

Await Further Instructions

For a sizable chunk of Johnny Kevorkian’s clunky sci-fi horror fable, the sheer inexplicable weirdness of the characters’ outlandish dilemma is (barely) enough to keep the film sputtering along. When Nick (Sam Gittins) takes girlfriend Annji (Neerja Naik) to meet his family on Christmas Eve, the hyperbolic awfulness of his suburban British clan – including Nick’s tightly wound father, snippy sister, and bigoted granddad – is more enervating than amusing. However, once the family discovers that they’ve been physically sealed inside their home by some mysterious entity, the escalating lunacy of their baffling situation has an undeniable dark energy, one veined with gruesome techno-organic terror. (Think The Outer Limits meets David Cronenberg.) However, in its final stretch, Await Further Instructions reveals itself as a hollow, hamfisted polemic, one with all the profundity of a bumper sticker. The filmmakers slather on shallow moralizing about the evils of screen slavery and blind obedience to authority, all to distract from how little thought they’ve given to the film’s scenario. Rating: D+[Now available to rent or purchase on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, and other platforms.]

Into the Dark: The Body

Hulu’s new anthology Into the Dark straddles the hazy line between cinema and television: Each month, the streaming service is serving up an original, standalone, feature-length horror film. Unfortunately, the series’ opening outing, The Body, is not an encouraging sign for future monthly offerings. Cleaning up after a high-profile job on Halloween night, stone-faced hitman Wilkes (Tom Bateman) discovers that when ghouls and goblins are about, no one bats an eye at a man lugging a cellophane-wrapped corpse through the streets. This should make a hired killer’s life easier, but Wilkes has the bad luck to be swept up in a cascade of fiascos with a gaggle of clueless, costumed partygoers. The dominant tone here is ostensibly a blackly comical one, although Paul Davis and co-writer Paul Fischer – expanding their 2013 short film of the same name – fail to wring laughs from all the bloody mayhem and tiresome Millennial potshots. The result is just dumb and dull, if fittingly gory in spurts. Rating: D+[Now available to stream exclusively on Hulu.]

Malevolent

In 1980s Scotland, siblings Jackson (Ben Lloyd-Hughes) and Angela (Florence Pugh) have a tidy scam going, staging phony “cleansings” of alleged haunted houses as a way to con grieving relatives and desperate homeowners. However, Angela – who plays the part of the medium – abruptly begins to have very real visions of the restless dead, not long before the pair take on a job at a rambling former foster home where several girls were once viciously slain. Malevolent has a few tick marks in its favor: some enjoyably musty production design, several genuinely unnerving shocks, and the presence of Pugh, who was so spellbinding in last year’s pitch-black Lady Macbeth. However, director Olaf Fleur Johannesson often seems to be flailing, as though he is uncertain where the plot is heading next or what sort of story he even wants to tell. By the time the film takes a hard left into grisly serial-killer territory, most of the suspense, pathos, and personality have long slipped away. Rating C-[Now available to stream exclusively on Netflix.]

Terrified

In a quiet Argentinian neighborhood, seemingly divergent paranormal phenomena are unfolding in three nearby houses. A horrified husband witnesses his wife being brutally murdered by an unseen force; a frazzled man is convinced a bogeyman is lurking somewhere in his home; and the recently buried corpse of a young boy turns up in his mother’s kitchen. Eventually, a police detective and cadre of paranormal sleuths arrive to uncover exactly what is happening. These characters are the closest thing to co-protagonists in the scattered and uneven Terrified, a sci-fi horror puzzle box that is less interested in telling a coherent story per se than in serving up bizarre incidents with a twist of cosmic terror. Writer-director Demián Rugna isn’t that concerned about little matters like lucidity or pacing, preferring to lean into those components that are grotesque, unfathomable, and morbidly amusing. It’s not good cinema, exactly, but the almost matter-of-fact approach to the film’s mélange of H.P. Lovecraft, Dean Koontz, and Stranger Things is memorable stuff. Rating C+[Now available to stream exclusively on Shudder.]

Apostle

Writer-director Gareth Evans’ bone-crunching Indonesian action diptych The Raid (2011) and The Raid 2 (2013) is many things – bloody, propulsive, ludicrous – but it is certainly not unfocused. The same cannot be said of Evans’ first foray into feature-length horror, Apostle. Set in the early years of the 1900s, the film follows Thomas (Dan Stevens) as he infiltrates an xenophobic pagan cult on a remote Welsh island. Posing as a newly converted pilgrim, Thomas seeks his missing sister, who is allegedly being held for ransom by the cult leadership, among them the charismatic prophet Malcomb (Michael Sheen). It’s plain Evans has enthusiasm for the material here, which blends elements of The Crucible, The Wicker Man (1973), and Children of the Corn (1984) into a forbidding and gruesome tale of ritual practice gone gangrenous. Unfortunately, the director’s propensity for indulgence leads to numerous scenes that – while often harrowing in the moment – feel protracted, meandering, and disconnected from the story as a whole. Rating C+[Now available to stream exclusively on Netflix.]

The Witch in the Window

Undoubtedly, some of the flaws in the chilly The Witch in the Window are attributable to the limitations of a low-budget production. Most conspicuous in this respect is the haunted setting itself, a Vermont farmhouse with chintzy, too-modern décor that clashes terribly with the moldering, gothic mood that the film is aiming for. However, the screenplay from writer-director Andy Mitton – who also edited and scored the feature – has other problems, primarily a peculiar disregard for the unsettling, tragic history that is the proper centerpiece of any decent ghost story. Instead, the titular witch is almost an afterthought in a melodrama about the fraught relationship between a father (Alex Draper) and his adolescent son (Charlie Tracker). The performers do their best to make this component credible and affecting, and Mitton admittedly has some talent for conjuring sensations of spine-tingling dread and surreal dislocation. However, Witch never gels into anything substantial; if feels less like a full-fledged horror film than a muted, bargain-bin approximation of one. Rating: D+[Now available to stream exclusively on Shudder.]

The Dark

Writer-director Justin P. Lange’s grim, pitiless road film The Dark is the sort of horror feature that is plainly striving to say something profound – in this case, about the topics of abuse, trauma, and recovery – but never quite articulates its thesis with clarity. What the viewer is left with, then, is a strange, miserabilist fable-cum-character study, one with a refreshing absence of world-building gobbledygook. Lange’s film collides an undead cannibalistic girl (Nadia Alexander) and a blind kidnapping victim (Toby Nichols) and then watches as their twisted survival mechanisms mutate in one another’s presence. It’s a ponderous, harrowing piece of work where death often arrives swiftly and cruelly, although Lange makes time for moments of bruised poignancy and gallows humor. The film’s moral worldview is an exasperating muddle, but on the whole, The Dark is a novel, intriguing riff on myriad monster tropes – zombie, revenant, werewolf, serial killer – that remains its own defiantly ghastly thing. Rating: B-[Now available to rent or purchase on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, and other platforms.]

The Director's Complete Filmography, From Worst to Best

In a 1999 Film Comment piece celebrating John Carpenter, the director memorably quipped to Kent Jones: “In France, I'm an auteur; in Germany, a filmmaker; in Britain; a genre film director; and, in the U.S.A., a bum.” After 20 years, it could be said that America has finally caught up with France, at least in this regard. Although he hasn’t made a feature film since 2010’s The Ward, the “Prince of Darkness” and his style have surfed a wave of nostalgia to attain a new prominence in the 2010s. Carpenter is currently on a world tour showcasing his trademark synthesizer scores; he has released two Lost Themes albums to moderate critical acclaim; and his fingerprints are all over contemporary genre filmmaking as far-reaching as the Duffer Brothers’ Netflix phenomenon Stranger Things and notable art-horror films such as David Mitchell’s It Follows (2015) and Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook (2014). The horror master has recently produced and scored director David Gordon Green’s Halloween (2018), the next installment in a Carpenter-birthed franchise as undying as its masked, malevolent Shape, Michael Myers.

However, it’s Carpenter’s cinematic work as a director that is ultimately worth revisiting, recontextualizing, and reevaluating. The filmmaker has asserted that he draws from two wildly disparate filmmakers in critic Andrew Sarris’ pantheon: Howard Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock. Although a mixture of those directors’ unique visual languages and thematic preoccupations might seem an unsettled thing, their heir apparent long ago cracked the underlying mutant chemistry. Carpenter retains the perfection of Hawks’ unadorned and unfussy genre cinema to examine people in their communal environments, while also deploying the Master of Suspense’s moralistic and downright experimental formalism to explore humanity in extremis. This marriage finds itself beautifully sprawled across Carpenter’s trademark widescreen Panavision images – a horizontally stretched fisheye viewpoint that demands exacting composition and world-building from the director. Almost all of his works employ this technology-cum-aesthetic – save for his made-for-television work, his debut feature Dark Star (1974), and The Ward (2010) – and even his worst films contain images of stunning confidence.

22. Ghosts of Mars (2001)

The occasionally compelling Ghost of Mars demonstrates the law of diminishing returns. Palpably divested of the charm or character of Carpenter's previous Rio Bravo (1959) riffs – Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), this is not – this ersatz rendition is a film in search of a point. Even with a bigger budget to realize the science-fiction veneer on the material, the film doesn’t hang together as a whole. (Perhaps illustrating that imitation is indeed flattery, Rio Bravo's own director, Carpenter hero Howard Hawks, attempted to retool his classic Western to mixed results in his later works El Dorado [1966] and Rio Lobo [1970].) Ghosts’ tedious, gory action demonstrates the unfortunate dulling of Carpenter's cinematic edge, while the B-list cast (Natasha Henstridge, Ice Cube, Jason Statham) mirrors the director's near-boredom with the film’s space-horror nonsense. Still, the film's sociopolitical exploration of group dynamics – ever-present in the director's oeuvre – provides some engaging ideas, especially in its reversing gender and sexual-orientation norms to explore how cishet male characters behave when they're in the minority.

21. Elvis (1979)

Having just wrapped production on Halloween (1978), Carpenter took the helm of this made-for-television biopic without knowing the cultural and financial cachet his slasher flick would soon afford him. The director's usual supreme control over blocking and composition are present in Elvis, but the miniseries' script is DOA hagiography. The storybook presentation works when it covers the King’s early years, but as the narrative creeps achingly slowly into his adulthood, the style wears paper-thin. The film's nuance-lacking plotting and characterizations are so elementary that it feels like a template for future, equally mundane musician biopics like Walk the Line (2005) and Ray (2004). Kurt Russell nails his impersonation of Presley, but it would be future teamings with Carpenter that would give the actor his most indelible and swaggering performances.

20. “Cigarette Burns” (2005) / “Pro-Life” (2006)

Showtime's Masters of Horror series was a second chance for many of Carpenter's genre brethren – Dario Argento, Tobe Hooper, and Stuart Gordon, to name a few – to create new work on a small scale and thereby re-introduce themselves. Carpenter, arguably the most recognizable name of the group, seized the opportunity himself after spending four years in the creative wilderness. With "Cigarette Burns" and "Pro-Life," the director wastes no time in presenting an increasingly cynical worldview – one without the careful contemplation of people and their habitats and containing even more bloodletting than ever before. "Pro-Life" is the more "fun" of the two, combining the hot-box setting of Assault on Precinct 13 with Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby (1968), contemporary political paranoia in tow. Similar to Sutter Cane's novels in In the Mouth of Madness (1995), "Cigarette Burns" centers on a lost French film that serves as a gateway for evil. Thanks to its meta-movie narrative, the episode gets a lot of love from Masters of Horror fans, but it's one of the most needlessly gory, unrelenting, and dumbest works in Carpenter’s filmography.

19. Body Bags (1993)

Made for Showtime as the seed for an unrealized anthology series, Body Bags is a largely tossed-off affair for its two directors, Carpenter and his contemporary Tobe Hooper (The Texas Chain Saw Massacre [1974]). Carpenter contributes not only by directing "The Gas Station" and "Hair," but also appearing onscreen as the segment presenter, a devilishly perverse morgue attendant. "Hair" is by far the lesser of his two shorts (and, really, all three), with Stacy Keach as a middle-aged yuppie who finds a dangerous solution to his receding hairline. A visually and thematically stale opportunity to present some stomach-churning special effects, this segment is particularly disappointing when paired with the return to slasher territory that is "The Gas Station." Someone’s Watching Me! (1978) and Halloween in miniature, the latter segment borrows equally from those earlier Carpenter films. Anne's (Alex Datcher) first night working at a filling station just off a desolate highway presents her with a cavalcade of moronic and skeezy male customers, including a possible serial killer on the loose. If "Hair" is a bad extended joke about fragile masculinity, "The Gas Station" is a superior metaphor about the leering male gaze and its owners' micro- and macro-aggressions.

18. Dark Star (1974)

As odd as a beach-ball puppet made to look like a space alien, the charmingly off-kilter Dark Star is Carpenter with training wheels – an opportunity for him to freely experiment with camera placement and movement and to create his first incredibly detailed environment in which he and his players can roam. Equal parts Arthur C. Clarke and Monty Python, Carpenter's debut feature – co-created with Dan O'Bannon, writer of Alien (1979) – probably would have gone the way of most student films if it weren't for its pedigree.

17. The Ward (2010)

Carpenter hasn’t exhibited the steep quality decline in his late work that has affliected Italian horror maestro Dario Argento over the past two decades. He also hasn’t been as prolific, which makes the more enticing aspects of The Ward disappointing, considering its gestation time. No, this as-of-now last feature for the American filmmaker doesn’t reach the highs of his earlier work, but it is nevertheless a sturdy “haunted house” asylum thriller, and the director once again dips a toe into imbalanced gender power dynamics. It lacks any real depth, however, devoid of the Hawksian exploration of the group that became a Carpenter trademark. Instead, it more closely resembles a cheap, William Castle-style spook-fest made by an analog master exploring his new, unfamiliar digital toys.

16. Vampires (1998)

Carpenter's nastiest concoction before "Cigarette Burns" only a few years later, Vampires is also the closest the director has come to making an actual Western. Everyone's favorite conservative Twitter bots, James Wood and Daniel Baldwin, star as bounty hunters-cum-vampire slayers who roam the Southwest attempting to save the world from eternal damnation via bloodsucker. The rich desert landscape is expertly mined for near-apocalyptic ends, and its opening – a film-in-miniature à la Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) – is promisingly well mounted. Save for other occasional moments of visual splendor and the appearance of the sublime Sheryl Lee, however, this gorefest is largely a laborious journey. It's a death rattle of a film and a final grasp at relevancy before the rock-bottom that is Ghosts of Mars.

15. Memoirs of an Invisible Man (1992)

Ostensibly a for-hire work, Memoirs of an Invisible Man is Carpenter's North by Northwest (1959), a cross-country "wrong man" thriller with its own inventive setpieces and blond romantic foil (Daryl Hannah). Unfortunately, star Chevy Chase is not Cary Grant, and while Chase's well-publicized smarm works in step with the director's condemnation of yuppie culture, the performer's inability to balance that with likeability undermines the film's central romance. Although at times Memoirs feels like it exists solely to exploit nascent computer-generated special-effects technology, the calibration and execution of the film is prime Carpenter. Shifting perspectives from its lead's state of confusion to the objective view of the director’s cinematic eye allows Carpenter to comment on an element of his exacting visual style: the precision in choosing what to include or exclude in his immersive widescreen frame.

14. Village of the Damned (1995)

Village of the Damned is a litmus test for an audience unacquainted with Carpenter's melodramatic high style. In every aspect of the film – from its turned-up-to-11 performances, to its unnatural computer-generated effects, to its radical compression of time – the director doesn't hold back in pushing Village to extremes. Any style removed from its era takes on a sheen of camp for a viewer without a working knowledge of that time, but Village might have seemed hokey to an audience even in 1995. The film is, indeed, a reworking of a 1960 cult hit of the same name about an immaculately conceived brood of psychic aliens. Updated with notions of populist conformity, a condemnation of the nuclear family, and hints of gender role critique, the wildly uneven Village would make for an off-putting first and last stop for those uninitiated with Carpenter. For others, it makes for a fun diversion.

13. Someone’s Watching Me! (1978)

Sure, the of-its-era title is corny, but Someone's Watching Me! emerges as a meta-joke about voyeurism and cinema. Lauren Hutton is the “Me,” a verbose, quirky television director new to Los Angeles. The “Someone” is a peeping Tom terrorizing her from a dueling high-rise building across the street. However, given that Carpenter privileges the audience with this information early in his television feature, they take on the role of the “Someone,” too. This isn’t particularly new territory for the genre – Michael Powell unleashed his camera-as-weapon thriller Peeping Tom 18 years earlier – but Carpenter relishes the opportunity to explore the limits of vision and audience complicity. Elements of the mise-en-scène betray the film’s cheap television-production mode, but the deft direction makes this portrait of sexualized violence against a woman all the more palpable and empathy-inducing.

11 - 12. Escape from New York (1981) / Escape from L.A. (1996)

It might be considered heresy to attribute the much-maligned Escape from L.A. with the same level of greatness as its predecessor. They are, however, equally good versions of the same film, albeit for different reasons. Escape from New York itself is the logical extension of the murky waters Carpenter waded through in Assault on Precinct 13, carrying the earlier film’s moral complexities into a dystopic future and deepening the divide between the powerful and powerless. This trash-infested, more fantastical vision presents a more expansive worldview that doubles down on its filmmaker’s mistrust of authority, depicting the moral currency exchanged in order to keep its criminal ecosystem alive. Elegantly structured and shot, even New York’s more leaden passages can be forgiven due to the doses of pure adrenaline it more often than not provides.

Carpenter’s “sequel” is the grimy rave-up remix of his original post-punk cult classic, utilizing almost exactly the same plot mechanics and structure. Therefore, L.A. could be seen as a cynical joke on the cynical riff: Years later, not only is the system still rigged, but it’s gotten even worse. This Escape is even more over-the-top than its predecessor, but sublimely so, ratcheting up the action to the point of abstraction and reaching higher highs along with its unfortunately dated lows. To the benefit of both films, at the explosive heart of everything is capable anti-hero Snake Plissken, brought to iconic realization with equal parts repugnancy and enviable cool by the inimitable Kurt Russell.

10. Big Trouble in Little China (1986)

The legacy of Big Trouble in Little China is fraught with accusations of cultural appropriation, stereotyping, and racism. The film is hardly defensible as a satire about the white person's view of Chinese-Americans – it does contain multitudes of regurgitated cultural falsities covering the narrow spectrum from the Good Asian to the Bad Asian. The key to this joyful mess of a movie is the audience's role in vaulting Jack Burton (Russell) to a heroic position, ignoring the fact that the white, largely hapless goon is there merely as an entry point into the utterly insane fantasia Carpenter has manufactured. Culled from Shaw Bros. kung-fu films of the 1970s, classic comic books, and ancient myths, Carpenter rightfully invited his largely Asian cast to join him in rendering their own cultural fantasies in an act of righteous re-appropriation.

9. In the Mouth of Madness (1994)

Carpenter's supposed paean to H.P. Lovecraft is actually closer to the Hitchcock parody-cum-homage of Mel Brooks' High Anxiety (1977). Insurance investigator John Trent (Sam Neil) and his gal Friday, literary agent Linda Styles (Julie Carmen), enter the "fictional" town of Hobb's End to find missing horror-fiction phenomenon Sutter Cane (Jürgen Prochnow). In the process, they endure a litany of monstrosities that allow the director to work himself up in a fanboy frenzy, deliriously dishing out New England horror tropes like a kid in a Stephen King-themed candy store. What Carpenter is truly after, however, is Lovecraft's philosophical determinism. The flashback framing device not only recalls the aforementioned Maine novelist’s work but also that of film noir classic Double Indemnity (1944). Trent is the in-over-his-head fall guy here, analogous to Indemnity’s Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray). That makes Carpenter – and his meta-stand-in Cane – the Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) of this con, pulling an already-doomed goon's strings to his inevitable end. With this, Carpenter's dissection of authorship – and therefore auteurism – affords him the opportunity to indict himself as the perpetrator of trauma à la Dario Argento in Tenebre (1982). What doesn't work as well is the entanglement of these notions with the critique of cultural monomania and mob mentality – ideas fleshed out better in the equally gonzo They Live (1988).

8. Prince of Darkness (1987)

Prince of Darkness owes much more to Howard Hawks – and Christian Nyby's, according to the credits – The Thing from Another World (1951) than to Carpenter's direct 1982 remake of that film. Hawks' feature is a contemplative and talky affair, focusing on the interpersonal and professional relationships of an Antarctic base camp where alien visitors run amok. Similarly, Prince collects a group of physicists, linguists, and theologians in a long-abandoned church to figure out just what the hell is in a Lovecraftian gold-and-glass cylinder filled with gravity-defying green goo. To some viewers, the college-dorm-room discussions about metaphysics and spirituality might wear thin over the course of the film, but they're always in service of characters who are facing down oblivion. In fact, Prince is imbued with such a great sense of urgency that the film proper can't help but keep interrupting its own opening credits. By the time Lucifer himself begins to reach into Carpenter's frame, the director has already manufactured one of his most detailed worlds – aided by eye-popping practical effects that actualize the blurring lines between reality and its sinister underbelly.

7. They Live (1988)

The establishment gave the punks the keys to the city, and after nearly a decade of trying to conform to the establishment’s ideals, one punk turned on his own. Carpenter, at his wit's end with the Gordon Geckos of the 1980s, ripped down a veil to reveal the insidious nature of American consumerism. Arguably, They Live's central metaphor becomes as bludgeoning as its notoriously protracted alleyway fistfight – the film squeezes every last drop of comedy from its truth-telling X-ray sunglasses – but this woke cultural object is still as deliriously fun as they come. Casting wrestler Roddy Piper as the lead was the director’s first middle finger to mainstream convention, but Carpenter also relishes the opportunity to hold the other one up to his audience – the sleeping masses lapping this crap up. Thirty years' time has revealed that Carpenter's warning was not heeded. Everyone has the sunglasses now, but unfortunately large swaths of the public have merely come to "chew bubblegum and kick ass."

6. Christine (1983)

Christine definitely contains the strains of sexual fetishization for which it’s probably most remembered – Arnie (Keith Gordon) asking the titular vehicular menace to show him what she’s got remains the most brazenly sexual moment in Carpenter’s oeuvre. Exactly what the film is fetishizing is an open question, however. There is some unbreakable bond Christine forms with her owners, but the director is largely concerned with the masculine fixation with Americana and American myths. Slyly using 1950s signposts like early rock ’n’ roll, Arnie’s James Dean-style glow-up, and the testosterone-driven ethos of teen-rebel flicks of the era, Carpenter equates Arnie’s dangerous and ultimately fatal obsession with post-World War II capitalistic lust for American power and supremacy. Arnie is a victim of a system that preys on the weak but also forces them to perpetuate its rules in order to gain dominance. Intentional or not, Christine is Marxist to its core, while still retaining an insidious sheen compelling its viewers to root for mayhem and destruction. In its details, however, this underrated Stephen King adaptation – lagging only slightly behind Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) and Brian De Palma’s Carrie (1976) in greatness – is remarkably forthcoming about both toxic masculinity and male sensitivity, eventually emerging as a heartbreaking parable about addiction and those who are swallowed whole by it.

5. The Fog (1980)

The Fog is distilled from discrete influences synthesized to maximum effect, like a campfire ghost story culled together from the greatest of urban legends. Seaside hamlet Antonio Bay is a direct lift of Bodega Bay from Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds (1963), not only in their matching coastal terrain but also in the way that both towns' inhabitants are assaulted by unfathomable forces. The details of the residents’ lives – namely their work and where they fit within a specific ecosystem – resemble the tight-knit communities formed in Hawks' films, Carpenter's other perennial cinematic touchstone. While Hitchcock and Hawks' DNA can be found throughout Carpenter's filmography, The Fog is distinctive in its debt to the phantasmagorical melodramas of Italian horror master Mario Bava. When the revenge-seeking pirate ghosts drift into town, saturated primary colors mix with the expressionistic chiaroscuro of blinding white lights against utter blackness. These visual schema are a Bava trademark, as is The Fog’s theme of inherited communal trauma, and Carpenter shapes his parable around America's original sins – allowing for a faceless mob to righteously settle a century-long score.

4. Assault on Precinct 13 (1976)

The director claims that his first true "Carpenter" film, Assault on Precinct 13, is apolitical. This is not only unequivocally false for Assault, but also for much of his subsequent work. A lean and mean violence machine, this Night of the Living Dead (1968) and Rio Bravo mashup places its audience squarely in the heart of darkness that is racial politics in the United States. The escalation of gunfire and blood between the police and a Los Angeles "gang" may have ambiguous origins, but the film proper begins with a racially diverse group of civilians being mowed down at the hands of the L.A.P.D. – a chilling moment that reverberates throughout the film and within the history of the country.

In describing it as "apolitical," Carpenter may be pointing towards his mostly distanced eye that leaves the viewer to question the film's moral and political ambiguities. The director tips his hand, however, when the previously absent police discover the survivors of the night in the precinct station from hell. The conflicted black cop (Austin Stoker) and his two white cohorts (Laurie Zimmer and Darwin Joston) have abandoned their socio-political stations in a fight for survival, and a shot lingers on them as they stare blankly at the policemen; the system in place to protect and serve did anything but.

3. Starman (1984)

Starman has earned a footnote in the Carpenter filmography as being the only film of the genre-oriented master to earn awards acclaim. Jeff Bridges garnered a deserved Best Actor Oscar nomination for playing the titular character, a role that requires the actor to physicalize both alien nothingness and transcendent human compassion. The recognition reaped by this almost Spielbergian heart-breaker shouldn't come as a shock. By skimming Carpenter's oeuvre, it's entirely possible to miss the fact that, at its best, his work is deeply humane. His cinematic apparatus is always keenly aligned to maximize the effect his images have on their viewers, and Starman, like all his greatest stories, is concerned with complexities of people and their mortality, spirituality, and aching to belong.

Yet the cult following that most of the Carpenter greats have attained over time has eluded this mournful and giving film. This might be attributable to the economy with which the director sketches his characters, which could be mistaken for sentimentality. A simple shot introducing the widow Jenny (Karen Allen) as she watches 8mm home movies of her and her deceased husband packs the same emotional wallop of the much-lauded prologue in Pete Docter’s Up (2009), and its compression of the alien both learning and teaching humanity from E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) is far more efficient and affecting here. Tightly constructed around typical genre movements – the comedy of behavioral errors, the cross-country chase, and the inevitable blossoming romance – Starman magically repurposes them to perfection, creating a unique and swoon-worthy portrait of humankind’s greatest qualities: mercy and empathy.

2. Halloween (1978)

If Starman is about the ultimate good in humanity and The Thing is about the complete dearth of it, then Halloween is perfectly situated as that spectrum’s midpoint. Carpenter's breakout depicts the battle between good and evil in their purest forms, a conflict so elemental that it arguably created the blueprint for every horror film that followed it. Not to diminish that (un-)holy trinity of modern American horror – Psycho (1960), Night of the Living Dead, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre – but Halloween’s imitators are arguably much greater in number, largely due to its narrative elegance and deceptive simplicity. It’s perhaps a fool’s errand to compare such disparate, masterful films, but Halloween has an influence advantage in bringing its savage monster into a much more relatable framework than does its predecessors.

It isn't simply that Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) and her fellow babysitters are in the midst of a common American experience: high school and all of its inherent sexual and political horrors. It’s the specificity of their characters and their mundane existences being torn asunder that create close identification with them. Halloween is sometimes cited as dictating the rules for subsequent slasher flicks – the Untouchable Virgin and the Final Girl, for example – but such codification was really the business of the film’s sub-par imposters, which missed the point of Carpenter’s feature altogether. There are no rules in Halloween. As rigid and exacting as Carpenter’s compositions and storytelling can be, they still allow for the chaotic unknowable, turning something as “traditional” as trick-or-treating into an act of adrenaline-fueled self-survival against an unstoppable being that knows only one commandment: Thou Shalt Kill.

1. The Thing (1982)

As marketing titles go, John Carpenter's The Thing is one of the more obvious in Hollywood's history. As efficient and ambiguous as the film itself, the title also gives appropriate ownership to the adapter of Hawke’s 1951 Red Scare metaphor, The Thing from Another World (and, by extension, its source material, Robert W. Campbell’s 1938 novella Who Goes There?). Notwithstanding its lineage, the resulting film is wholly Carpenter's. In fact, The Thing represents the perfection of all the (still relatively new) filmmaker's preoccupations: political dynamics of the group, humanity's most basic instincts, dogmatism versus pragmatism, and the capacity of the camera to convey worldviews in flux.

The Thing's alien infection in human hosts is so vividly rendered, mutating into uncanny forms sprung forth from the darkest corners of their creator’s subconscious, that the shock and awe of its effects tap into the viewer's own buried-deep phobias. To that end, the film is subject to myriad readings: Cold War paranoia parable, prescient AIDS-epidemic metaphor, missive to hetero-masculinity, or an assault on Reagan-era individualism-centric values. Those metaphors aside, Carpenter's precise filmmaking behaves just like a live wire to a petri dish, explosively uncovering the extremes to which humans will go for survival. The Thing is a barn-burner of a masterpiece that transcends its cult following as a humane work of art, worthy of endless study no matter what shape that takes.

I Am the “Who” When You Call, “Who’s There”?

Director John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) is not the first modern English-language slasher film: That honor goes to Bob Clark’s eerie sorority-house bloodbath Black Christmas (1974), or perhaps Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) if one is inclined to bend the definition a bit. (One probably shouldn’t, given that Hooper’s singular, radically nihilistic film leaves so many of the genre’s traditional boxes unchecked.) Although Carpenter missed the thin, leading edge of the slasher wave by a few years, he unquestionably perfected it with Halloween, cementing his historical standing as the Bram Stoker to Clark’s John Polidori. While Black Christmas is a groundbreaking film – chilling and ambitious, if a bit uneven – Carpenter’s film is a stone-cold masterpiece.

Commendably lean in the manner of many great American indies of the 1970s, Halloween is the Platonic ideal of the slasher form: impeccably executed, bracingly stylish, and brutally straightforward. It’s just as admirable for the things it lacks: no convoluted backstory, no superfluous characters, and no narrative wheel-spinning. Just an escaped criminal sociopath named Michael Myers (Nick Castle) – famously dubbed simply “The Shape” in the film’s credits – and an unsuspecting (although not helpless) teenaged babysitter named Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis). Five minutes into the feature, the director has already offered up those essential talismans of the genre, spilled blood and naked breasts. Nothing about Halloween is perfunctory, however, and everything serves its raison d'être. Carpenter and co-writer/producer Debra Hill essentially fashioned every last aspect of their film – dialog, composition, cinematography, editing, and landmark electronic score – around the raw, elemental terror of a masked maniac with a knife.

Even filmgoers with an aversion to slasher flicks are likely aware that Halloween spawned a plethora of sequels and remakes, including the strange, standalone tangent Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982) and a misguided but fascinatingly deranged, double-feature reimagining from director Rob Zombie (2007; 2009). To say that the 1979 original outshines these myriad cash-ins and reboots would be gross understatement. Accordingly, a horror aficionado could be forgiven for approaching a new Halloween feature with some trepidation.

The latest filmmaker to confront the unstoppable Mr. Myers is David Gordon Green, a maddeningly mercurial director whose filmography includes both an acclaimed coming-of-age indie landmark (George Washington [2000]) and a stoner comedy set in the Middle Ages (Your Highness [2011]). Although his more violent psychological dramas Undertow (2004) and Joe (2015) certainly have their grisly elements, horror is a genre that the director has not previously tackled. Green’s Halloween – which is a direct, 40-years-later sequel to Carpenter’s original, disregarding all the other films in the franchise – was co-written with his regular collaborators Jeff Fradley and Danny McBride, the latter known as the star and co-creator of the HBO comedies Eastbound & Down (2009 - 13) and Vice Principals (2016 - 17).

The indefatigable Curtis has returned once again to the role of Laurie Strode, 16 years after her previous re-return, in the inexcusable Halloween: Resurrection (2002). And Carpenter himself has composed the score for the new feature, alongside his son Cody Carpenter and Daniel A. Davies, reworking his indelible synth themes from the original film. Given this strange and seemingly ill-fitting lineup of talent, it’s hard to say what one should be expecting from this new take on Halloween, beyond the stock components of Michael Myer’s pale, shapeless mask and a hefty tally of stabbing victims. What director Green delivers is, rather surprisingly, something akin to a Halloween fan film on a Hollywood budget: a winking, reference-dense appreciation of Carpenter’s masterwork that, while capable and modestly entertaining, has little of the original’s sinewy clarity or spine-tingling power. In short, Green’s feature is The Force Awakens of Halloween films.

A slasher enthusiast can likely recount the film’s backstory from memory: In Haddonfield, Illinois, six-year-old Michael Myers stabbed his own adolescent sister to death on Halloween night in 1963, ultimately resulting in his incarceration in a mental hospital. Almost exactly 15 years later, he escaped from said institution and returned to his hometown, where he proceeded to stab, strangle, and bludgeon his way through a (surprisingly modest) gaggle of random victims, most of them high school students. His rampage was cut short by 18-year-old Laurie Strode, who outsmarted him long enough for Michael’s own psychiatrist, Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasance), to show up and put six bullets into the seemingly unstoppable killer. Whereupon Michael vanished into the night.

That’s Carpenter’s Halloween in all its dreadful elegance, and one of the immediately irksome things about Green’s new film – one of the irksome things about every post-1978 Halloween feature, really – is that it undercuts the almost folkloric tone of the original’s ambiguous conclusion. In this case, it does so by insisting that Michael was recaptured and re-institutionalized shortly after the end credits rolled. Now 60-ish but still physically imposing, Michael (James Jude Courtney) has kept up his previous silent streak by not saying a word for the past four decades of his confinement. One day, British true-crime podcasters Aaron Korey (Jefferson Hall) and Dana Haines (Rhian Rees) arrange for a visit with Haddonfield’s most notorious native son. Rather foolishly, Korey has brought along the original rubber Halloween mask Michael wore during his 1978 killings, dangling the now-ragged thing in an unsuccessful effort to elicit some sort of reaction. Astonishingly, this act of naked provocation doesn’t much distress Michael’s current psychiatrist, Dr. Sartain (Haluk Bilginer), marking the physician as a bit more sanguine than the late Dr. Loomis, who flat-out claimed his patient was Evil incarnate.

Korey and Haines have an equally disappointing encounter with Laurie Strode, now living like a paranoid doomsday prepper on the outskirts of Haddonfield, where she’s hunkered down in a house equipped with security cameras, booby traps, a basement panic room, and a stockpile of firearms. Laurie is pragmatic enough to take the $3,000 offered by the podcasters in exchange for an interview, but savvy enough to reveal virtually nothing of value before throwing them out on their ears. Of course, Korey already knows that Laurie is twice-divorced and estranged from her adult daughter Karen (Judy Greer), whose upbringing revolved around preparing to one day kill Michael Myers when – not if – he returns. Spoiler: He does. Not to question the wisdom of the Illinois Department of Corrections, but why would they arrange for the prison transfer of a notorious Halloween-night killer on a foggy October 30 evening, 40 years to the day since he last escaped and murdered several people? Why tempt fate like that?

The screenplay problems are self-evident at this point. The podcasters Korey and Dana are slick, hollow non-characters, and Korey in particular is something of an arrogant wanker, the sort of prick who is practically begging to be butchered in a 2010s horror feature. This only serves to highlight that the pair have just two purposes in the story. First, their presence allows Dr. Sartain and Laurie to spout exposition regarding everything that’s happened during the past 40 years. Secondly, the podcasters bring Michael’s iconic mask within physical proximity of Haddonfield, so that he can easily retrieve it once he escapes. It’s dreadfully results-oriented writing, and its most immediate effect is that when Korey and Haines are inevitably (and brutally) murdered, their deaths barely register as anything except obligatory tasks to which Michael must attend.

This points to what is perhaps the fundamental failing of the new Halloween: Until the admittedly nail-biting climax, it isn’t especially moody, tense, or emotionally fraught. One of the brilliant, often overlooked aspects of Carpenter’s original feature is the slow-burn way it establishes a sinister atmosphere, withholding its most shocking violence until the back half of the film. Setting aside the 1963 prelude and a motorist who is killed off-screen, Michael’s homicidal rampage doesn’t truly get going until the 45-minute mark or so. Up to that point, he’s just a lurking presence that gradually grows more menacing; the nameless Shape that Laurie glimpses across the street, behind a hedgerow, or amid the laundry hanging in the backyard, seemingly always disappearing in a swirl of dried autumn leaves.

Michael Myers has become such a familiar horror villain, it’s probably impossible to completely replicate that spooky atmosphere of encroaching, predatory Evil. However, Green and company barely even attempt to do so, structuring their story in such a way that the gore starts gushing relatively early in the film, and then continues to do so at a steady rate. The effect is to render scenes of gruesome murder plodding and dutiful rather than shocking, as if a Halloween film’s primary obligation is to gracelessly serve up as many scenes as possible of Michael bashing skulls and knifing abdomens. Admittedly, these murders are often presented with striking formal flair. For example, some of the early slayings are captured in long, eerily impassive Steadicam shots in which the camera peers through pumpkin-bedecked windows or wanders down shadowed driveways. In isolation, these scenes are unquestionably stylish and giddily enjoyable in a “He’s-right-behind-you!” funhouse way. However, they don’t add much to either the mood or the story of the surrounding feature, feeling rather like Green has created a series of abstracted Halloween-themed short films.

Next to Laurie and Michael, the film is most focused on Karen’s daughter Allyson (Andi Matichak), a bright, popular high school senior who has recently become eager to reconnect with the “crazy” grandmother she’s been shielded from for most of her life. (In a work that’s otherwise such a mash note to the 1978 original, the filmmakers make the odd choice to explicitly not saddle Allyson with a babysitting gig on Halloween night.) This family drama doesn’t amount to much in practice, which is consistent with pretty much everything else plot-wise that doesn’t involve Michael stabbing people. This applies to both Allyson’s relationship angst with her asshole-in-sheep’s-clothing boyfriend Cameron (Dylan Arnold) and to the faintly antagonistic banter between the wary Officer Hawkins (Will Patton) and his glib colleague Sheriff Barker (Omar Doresey). Incidentallty, the law enforcement aspects of the screenplay are a hopeless muddle, in the fine tradition of most 1980s slashers; the film seemingly can’t decide if Hawkins is a part of the county or municipal sheriff’s department.

There’s a certain purity to how little all the character details matter in the end, since – in keeping with Carpenter’s original – Michael’s path is essentially random, and he ends up pursuing Allyson largely by happenstance, much as he did her grandmother. Indeed, there’s no explicit evidence that he’s searching for Laurie to finish her off these 40 years later, her paranoia to the contrary notwithstanding. When three generations of Strode women wind up facing down Michael at Laurie’s fortress-house in the third act, it’s mostly due to a series of arbitrary decisions and chance encounters. This echoes Michael’s pinballing trail through the 1978 film somewhat, but it also underlines how much meaningless padding there is in the new screenplay, especially compared to Carpenter’s fat-free original.

More than anything, Green’s film feels like a big, sloppy act of fan-service: It’s replete with references to the original film and the sequels, even to red-headed stepchild Halloween III. Some of these nods are little more than a line, shot, or sound cue, but they’re rarely subtle, especially for the devoted horror hound who has seen Carpenter’s film multiple times and absorbed its every detail. These sorts of jokey allusions are eye-rolling more often than they are clever, although it’s all much more good-natured and tolerable here than it was in the shamelessly “ironic” Halloween H20 (1998). At least Green, Fradley, and McBride are joyously, obsessively focused on the Halloween franchise itself, rather than taking a piss on other franchises or making clunky meta-jokes. The closest the film comes to the latter is a line that disposes of Halloween II (1981) with a swipe, dismissing the rumor that Laurie was secretly Michael Myers’ long-lost sister as pure urban legend. (One is inclined to forgive anything that un-rings that particular bell.)

Whether or not for-the-fans exercises like this new Halloween are harmless R-rated fun or cynical pandering may be a matter of the individual viewer’s visceral response to such things. On a shot-for-shot level, Green and his crew are simply too accomplished at what they do to dismiss the film as pure hackwork. It’s perhaps unfair to compare cinematographer Michael Simmonds’ efforts here with that of Dean Cundey’s evocative work on the 1978 original, given the latter man’s legendary warping of the film’s color scheme – an allegedly practical tweak meant to conceal that “autumn in Illinois” is clearly summer in California. Simmonds mostly keeps the new film within the boundaries of a conventional 21st-century horror aesthetic, but his use of obfuscating darkness is truly marvelous stuff. These are not the Expressionist-style stabbing shadows of Carpenter’s film, but something closer to a clinging, pitch-black mist that plays tricks on the eye. It provokes the viewer to constantly, anxiously search the squirming darkness for the faint ghost of Michael’s hollow-eyed mask.

Holding the whole film together – and connecting it more solidly to the 1978 feature than all of Green’s visual callbacks – is the phenomenal score. It’s not a retread, but rather an elaboration on the original film’s two or three jittery, synthesized themes, with the Carpenters and Davies using the full breadth of the present-day digital toolkit to create and rich, menacing soundscape. If Carpenter’s original score was haunting in its skin-crawling simplicity, the new compositions are more overtly hellish and terrifying. There’s a particular blast of demonic rumbling in many of the chase sequences that is somehow shrill, even though it pulsates deep beneath the familiar tinkling of the main Halloween theme. It’s a terrific contribution from Carpenter and his collaborators, easily his best work as a film composer since Prince of Darkness (1987). It’s also a welcome dose of vigorous creativity in a film that often feels like it’s coasting on fan goodwill and the superficial appeal of a well-staged cinematic murder.

The Agony and the Ecstasy

The 1950s - 70s heyday of the United States’ manned space program has been a relatively successful (if strangely infrequent) source of compelling cinematic stories, inspiring both rousing dramas (The Right Stuff [1983], Apollo 13 [1995]) and engrossing documentaries (For All Mankind [1989], In the Shadow of the Moon [2007]). The saga of America’s feverish mid-century push into the unforgiving void of space is so fascinating – and so improbable – all on its own, a filmmaker could be forgiven for taking the easy route and leaning into the story’s inherent grandeur and triumphalism. This makes it especially impressive that director Damien Chazelle and screenwriter Josh Singer have taken such a non-intuitive approach with First Man, a harrowing, brooding dramatization of Neil Armstrong’s journey from experimental aircraft pilot to historical immortality. Armstrong, after all, was a notoriously private individual, a man whose humility, reticence, and level-headedness – his terminal blandness, one might say – were precisely the qualities that prompted NASA to select him for the command of the Apollo 11 mission.

Such characteristics are not normally the stuff of captivating cinematic heroes. However, rather than crafting a rip-roaring space adventure that would sharply clash with his subject’s personality, Chazelle has instead fashioned his film around Armstrong’s renowned opacity. Admittedly, Singer’s screenplay indulges in some glib armchair psychoanalysis. The death of the Armstrongs’ two-year-old daughter Karen by a malignant tumor is portrayed as the seminal event in the man’s personal life, a bottled-up dose of radioactive grief he figuratively and literally carries to the moon’s surface. For the most part, however, First Man depicts Armstrong as an inhumanly stoic individual, possessing both adamantine focus and a sphinxlike inscrutability. Chazelle has accordingly constructed a defiantly clenched and suffocating story that harmonizes with that characterization. In the director’s conception, the space race becomes a cramped, hellish ordeal of rattling terror, physical agony, and outright blood sacrifice. When the audience is allowed glimpses of the humbling majesty of space, it's mostly in fleeting faceplate reflections and though tiny, fogged-up windows – until the film’s breathtaking climax, when the weight of all that suffering is expelled in a rush with the opening of the Apollo 11 Lunar Module hatch.

Crucial to the film’s success is its leading man, Ryan Gosling, who invests this fictionalized iteration of Armstrong with an almost synthetic tranquility that would come off as unfeeling, were the actor not so skilled at suggesting the bruised, hunched human resolve underneath the chilliness. It’s the sort of restrained-yet-cavernous mode of performance that is Gosling’s forte, also evidenced by his masterful turn as the android anti-hero in last year’s Blade Runner 2049. His Armstrong is quietly fervent, unfailingly modest, and occasionally prickly at the intrusion of something so impractical as human interaction. When fellow astronaut Ed White (Jason Clarke) approaches a visibly distressed Armstrong, who is standing alone in the nocturnal gloom of his backyard after a colleague’s funeral, Gosling quietly glowers, “What makes you think I’m out here because I want to talk?”

Most of the time, it’s Armstrong’s long-suffering wife Janet (Claire Foy, excellent in the typically thankless “worried spouse” role) who is obliged to decode her husband’s stony silence and endure his buttoned-up remoteness. These become more pronounced following their daughter’s death early in the film, a loss that Armstrong never again discusses with his wife. He prefers to secret it away much like Karen’s beaded infant bracelet, which he places with moist-eyed finality in a desk drawer on the day of her burial.

First Man never uncritically lionizes the stripe of dutiful, taciturn American masculinity that Armstrong embodies. On the eve of the Apollo 11 mission, all of Janet’s resentments at his emotional inaccessibility come pouring out in a cold, spitfire torrent that carries the sting of truth. However, the film also illustrates that the qualities that made Armstrong an at-times-difficult husband, father, and friend also made him the right man for an unprecedented job. Chazelle often contrasts the man’s reserved professionalism with the voluble boorishness of fellow Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin (Corey Stoll), a characterization that feels facetious, albeit germane to the film’s proposition: Armstrong’s all-business distaste for the spotlight made him an ideal choice for mission commander.

Except for a few flickering, impressionistic flashbacks, First Man unspools in a scrupulously chronological manner, following Armstrong from a test flight in a X-15 hypersonic aircraft in April 1962 through the immediate aftermath of the Apollo 11 mission in July 1969. Chazelle’s approach to the story is akin to a nitty-gritty procedural, wherein engineering jargon is rattled off with a naturalistic absence of explanation. John Sturges’ similarly wonky but comparatively turgid 1969 feature Marooned is an obvious touchstone, and viewers who are not space exploration junkies or NASA history enthusiasts may be a bit lost at times. The director tightly constrains the action to Armstrong’s perspective, with supplemental snippets depicting events as Janet experiences them – often from the vantage point of the family’s living room, where a squawk box relays the audio feed from Mission Control.

Accordingly, First Man is not so much an exhaustive dramatization of the U.S. space program in the 1960s as it is an attempt to conjure the subjective experience of Armstrong’s journey. Appropriately enough, the film focuses primarily on the missions that he experienced firsthand: the near-catastrophic Apollo 8 and the momentous Apollo 11. Tellingly, Chazelle also makes time for those incidents that resulted in the deaths of Armstrong’s colleagues, such as the demise of Elliot See (Patrick Fugit) in a training jet crash in 1966, or the disastrous Apollo 1 launch rehearsal that claimed three astronauts’ lives in 1967.

This emphasis on loss, grief, and the sheer lethality of the NASA program is of a piece with First Man’s approach in depicting space exploration, which in Chazelle’s conception has the dread-drenched sensibility of a horror film. The director places the viewer directly inside the claustrophobic confines of the Gemini and Apollo capsules, where the astronauts are strapped in like death-row convicts and their field-of-view is limited to a bewildering array of analog dials, switches, and gauges. Liftoff and re-entry are presented here as blind gauntlets of enervating noise and vibration, akin to riding a rickety roller coaster into the depths of hell itself. There’s little room for awe underneath the roar of millions of pounds of exploding rocket fuel and the constant, nerve-fraying squeal of metal. Chazelle often flashes in extreme close-up on individual screws and seams in the spacecraft assembly, as if to emphasize the paltry, mundane materials that separate the crew from certain death.

In First Man, nothing about the space race seems measured, thoughtful, or scrupulous. Indeed, it feels rather like madness: a careening scramble from one wobbly Hail-Mary gambit to the next, with the charred bodies of good men strewn in its wake. “You’re a bunch of boys making models out of balsa wood,” Janet scoffs in disgust at one point to Astronaut Office chief Deke Slayton (Kyle Chandler). “You don’t have anything under control.” Whatever nobility exists in NASA’s endeavors feels distant and immaterial when, for example, the Apollo 8 capsule inexplicably malfunctions and begins to tumble end-over-end towards Earth at blackout speeds.

Proximally speaking, Cold War anxiety over Soviet achievements in both unmanned and manned space flight is what lends the film’s events such life-or-death urgency. However, Armstrong himself points to a more expansive, philosophical view of NASA’s mission during his first interview to join the Astronaut Corps. Asked why he thinks manned space exploration is vital, he responds matter-of-factly that it presents humankind with the opportunity for a new perspective, regarding its own history and its place in the cosmos. This sentiment is echoed in the film’s sharp stylistic shift during the climactic Apollo 11 mission. For most of First Man’s running time, Chazelle and cinematographer Linus Sandgren employ grainy 16 mm and 35 mm physical film to give the feature a vintage look. They rely on jittery, vérité close-ups to an almost perverse extent, given that this film is ostensibly about outer space. During the moon landing and walk, however, the filmmakers switch to the sharper, widescreen majesty of IMAX 70 mm film, reflecting the epochal change in human history that attended Armstrong’s first step into the lunar dust. It’s heavy-handed as hell, and it works wonderfully.

First Man categorically embraces the view that setting foot on the moon is one of the pinnacles (if not the pinnacle) of human achievement, and as Gosling’s Armstrong stands alone on the rim of a lunar crater, regarding what Aldrin memorably termed the “magnificent desolation”, it’s easy to imagine the swell of uncanny awe he must have felt. For all the film’s nerve-wracking, unromantic verisimilitude, First Man has a starry-eyed, even old-fashioned ethos that heralds space exploration as an innately worthwhile endeavor. Occasionally, Chazelle’s attempts to convey this point feel clumsy and tone-deaf, as when he contrasts the rock-ribbed determination of NASA’s astronauts and engineers with an afroed rabble-rouser whose protest poetry laments the expense of putting “whitey on the moon” when the U.S. has so many earthbound problems.

Overall, however, First Man feels less like a triumphant paean to America’s past accomplishments than a reaffirmation of the intrinsic value of human struggle, in whatever form it takes. Although Chazelle’s jazz Passion play Whiplash (2014) might seem light-years apart from his latest feature, both are absorbed with the allure of the (seemingly) impossible. First Man’s privileging of the forbidding reality of the space program – every drop of toil, sorrow, and failure that preceded Armstrong’s one small step – points to a kind of anti-triumphant masochism, a belief that the destination is less important than the grueling misery of the journey. While wandering his post-mission quarantine quarters and marveling at the suddenly-surreal banality of his surroundings, Armstrong’s attention is drawn to an archival clip of John F. Kennedy on television. Undeniably on-the-nose and yet still stirring, the late President’s renowned 1962 words could be First Man’s thesis statement: “Why, some say, the moon? […] We choose to go to the moon… not because [it is] easy, but because [it is] hard.”

The Song Remains the Same

Not long into A Star is Born, it's become apparent that Bradley Cooper will be a real contender as a filmmaker. His visual influences are evident: Martin Scorsese’s gliding and orchestral tracking shots; Terrence Malick’s unencumbered camera with its awe-inspiring focus on people in their natural habitats; and the stoic classicism of Cooper's American Sniper (2014) director, Clint Eastwood, also an actor-turned-filmmaker. While such divergent aesthetic modes may seem at odds with one other, Cooper – who also stars and co-wrote A Star Is Born with Eric Roth – fuses their syntaxes into his own distinctive schema, revealing the director’s real interest: melodrama and its built-in ideas about identity and human behavior in extremis.

The traditionally feminine-associated melodrama informs all four previous versions of A Star is Born, but here it rubs shoulders with the more masculine drive of the aforementioned cinematic influences. In fact, Cooper’s version recalls a less precious and more relaxed version of Terrence Malick’s elegiac rock-and-roll feature Song to Song (2017) by way of the aesthetically lush and sociological astute “women’s pictures” of Douglas Sirk (e.g., Imitation of Life [1959]). This isn’t an inherently unworthy way of working through a story absorbed with the way people perform gender-associated qualities, but, by the film’s end, the director largely squanders the opportunity to express a fresh vision of a familiar story.

A shot early in the film encapsulates the thematic potential. Country singer/songwriter Jackson Maine (Cooper) drunkenly stumbles into a gay bar on drag night. While he’s not entirely condescending to the patrons and performers of the bar – he's just looking for nightcap, after all – he’s still a good-ol’-boy mega-star in an outwardly queer communal space. After the electrifying Edith Piaf-impersonating performance of Ally (Lady Gaga), he easily ingratiates himself backstage in order to meet her, and eventually charms his way into a drink with her. While she readies herself, he does an impromptu unplugged performance for the queens (RuPaul’s Drag Race alumni Willam Belli and D.J. 'Shangela' Pierce) in the now-closed bar. Maine stands left of frame, performing in the brightly-lit disco-themed bar to the offscreen queens, one of whom is reflected – seemingly staring directly at the viewer – in a mirror in the shot's background.

It’s the kind of gorgeously glittery and ironic tableaux that Sirk and his acolyte Rainer Werner Fassbinder so often constructed in their films. The cisgender man sings “Maybe It’s Time” – a song ostensibly about the cultural shift away from traditional norms – to a queer audience that the frame elides, while the compartmentalized reflection of the subversion of those norms stares directly at the film’s audience. A blink-and-you’ll-miss-it act of confrontation, the shot’s irony ripples outward through the first half of Cooper’s Star, two acts of cinematic magnetism carried by the filmmaker’s ability to stir the audience’s emotions, while implicating them as a part of the system he criticizes.

By using melodrama’s innate exploration of the ways in which people craft their identities, Cooper further elucidates the already-present themes about relational and public personas. Maine’s drug and alcohol addiction seems to stem from the gulf between his public self and the self he’s created from the disparate parts of his powerful, masculine older brother, Bobby (Sam Elliot), and their deceased father. Even Bobby recognizes this when he chastises Maine for adopting his trademark voice. Cooper – in a monumental but quiet turn that resembles the repressed anguish of Heath Ledger in Brokeback Mountain (2005) – has done exactly the same kind of vocal duplication in mimicking Elliot, adding a metatextual layer about the crafting of performance.

Ally’s physical appearance is the hindrance between the obviously talented singer/songwriter and true success. Maine imbues her with the confidence necessary for her destined breakout, to the point of almost fetishizing her nose, the feature she internalizes as her most conspicuous weakness. When Maine forces Ally onstage to sing the Oscar-bound “Shallow,” the director slyly nods to Maine’s own objectification of Ally, showing the male half of the duo staring up in awe at his partner’s face on the large screen behind them, rather than looking at her directly from just feet away. Maine later criticizes the Hollywood machine-crafted pop seductress persona Ally adopts, in a move that highlights his own idealized down-home version of her.

In casting Lady Gaga as Maine’s female counterpoint, the director imports even more metatextual information. Ally’s father – Andrew Dice Clay in another supporting role as an aspirational blue-collar man, similar to his great turn in Blue Jasmine (2013) – discusses public image-making in the same manner as the industry people in the film's more obvious Hollywood-demonizing second half. The tastemakers want Ally to be platinum blonde – a Gaga trademark – but she opts for a neon orange hue instead. These scenes carry the weight of Gaga’s own self-heralded rise to fame, her transcendence of harmful beauty standards to become the “Mother Monster,” and her audience’s obsession with their own ideals of her. Onscreen, the luminous Gaga is acting light years beyond her leaden Golden Globe-winning turn in American Horror Story: Hotel (2015-16), but her eyes – and the film’s careful editing – still betray the novice actor’s seemingly paralyzing fear of the camera.

In adhering to a now 81-year-old narrative, Cooper’s film pivots towards more outwardly plotty material halfway through its running time. It thereby loses its near-mystical sheen, taking on the more traditional, plasticky tone of the Barbra Streisand-starring 1976 iteration, starkly opposed to the mournful fogginess of George Cukor’s 1954 version featuring Judy Garland. To this end, a Grammy Awards ceremony gone awry is embarrassingly mis-staged and a wasted opportunity to further the ideas of public performance from earlier in the film. Furthermore, the feature’s denigration of the pop genre is grossly old-fashioned, undermining its Gaga-borrowed musical ethos.

Finally, as a portrait of codependency, this Star further falters due to the framing of Ally’s success as occurring concurrently with Maine’s downfall. Given that the film shifts largely to his point-of-view, it also asks the audience to sympathize with a man whose failures are dangerously equated with a woman’s success. Although this conceit is built into the fabric of the material, it’s nevertheless a problematic move that repurposes the entire film as an ode to “traditional,” heteronormative values. Its audience-rallying, tear-jerking finale therefore falls flat, made all the more disappointing by the film’s previous goodwill in mounting subversive acts that it ultimately ends up wasting.